Harvard and M.I.T. Take Their Classes Online

Digital classrooms are a growing field, so it’s no surprise that traditional brick-and-mortar universities are increasingly looking to add an online element to their learning platforms.

This week Harvard and M.I.T. joined the fray with a $60 million online-classroom venture named edX. The nonprofit enterprise will offer a variety of free courses across disciplines for anyone with an Internet connection.

EdX seeks to move beyond mere video tutorials by incorporating discussions, labs, quizzes and other interactive learning tools into the lesson plan. And because edX is an open-source project, it has the potential for other universities such as Stanford — who successfully offered their own online Artificial Intelligence class last year — to use the project.

M.I.T said it would rely on its existing online initiative MITx as the foundation for edX. Anant Agarwal, director of M.I.T.’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (Csail), has been tapped to be edX’s first president. The initial round of edX courses will be announced this summer and students can start taking classes — which come with a certificate of completion — in the fall.